THE RECENT WAVE of church bombings, kidnappings, and executions of
civilians in Iraq seems to support a contested claim by the Bush
administration: that radical Islam is the philosophical cousin to European
fascism; that it has less to do with politics than with nihilistic rage. As
Bush put it in his address to Congress barely a week after the 9/11
attacks, "By sacrificing human life to serve their radical visions--by
abandoning every value except the will to power--they follow in the path of
fascism, and Nazism, and totalitarianism." The president has asserted
an Islamist-fascist link in at least a dozen speeches over the last three
years.

Critics assail this argument as dangerously
"ideological"--there's too much moralizing about the evil of
terrorism, they say, and not enough curiosity about the "root
causes" of Islamic violence. Religious liberals such as Bob Edgar of
the National Council of Churches deride Bush's moral vocabulary as a way of
"dehumanizing" America's enemies. Writing recently in the New
York Times Book Review, political scientist Ronald Steel scolds
administration hawks for ignoring "the essentially political causes of
terrorism."

The eyewitnesses to Nazi terrorism, however, might well take exception
to that view. Eric Voegelin, whose 1938 book The Political Religions
made him a target of the Third Reich, offers perhaps the best-known
critique of the moral and spiritual rationalizations of fascist ideology. A
short work published in 1939 by philosopher Lewis Mumford, however, is also
worth revisiting. Titled Men Must Act, the book grew out of
Mumford's visit to Germany in the early 1930s. There he saw copies of Mein
Kampf ("my struggle," Hitler's autobiography and political
manifesto published in 1926) being snatched up in bookstores. He watched
how Nazi brownshirts had taken over the streets in Lübeck, and listened at
dinner parties as upper-class Germans praised Hitler's program against the
Jews.

Writing when America was still in a pacifist mood, Mumford aimed to prod
U.S. support for the Allied cause. His summary of fascist principles reads
today like a recruiting manual for the al Qaeda network: (1) the
glorification of war, (2) a hatred for democracy, (3) a hatred for
civilization, (4) a contempt for science and objectivity, and (5) a delight
in physical cruelty.

The sadism and irrationality of fascism have long been favorite themes
among scholars, but many in America came under the spell of its
pseudo-scientific arguments. Bigotry was part of the reason: From 1933 to
1941, over a hundred anti-Semitic groups appeared in the United States,
many of them with a Christian hue. Some of Mumford's close friends turned
against him when he argued that Nazi claims rested on racist,
conspiratorial delusions. "What the leader desires is real: what he
believes is true: what he anathematizes is heresy," he wrote. "These
fiat truths bring about a debasement of the entire intellectual
currency."

How does that compare to Islamic radicalism?

The writings and statements of Osama bin Laden, and those of his
philosophical mentor, Sayyid Qutb, point to the true nature of their
grievances. The object of their hatred is not merely "international
Jewry"--the Nazi slogan--but all "infidels," in particular
the "Zionist-crusader alliance." The terrorist attacks in Iraq
show that the enemies of al Qaeda include citizens not only of the United
States, but of Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Kuwait, Kenya, India,
Bulgaria, South Korea, and the Philippines. They may be politicians,
police, factory employees, doctors, relief workers--anyone supporting a
decent civil society. They include not only Christians and Jews, but
dissenting Muslims. Here, then, is an ideology that reviles anyone who
upholds the moral norms of civilized states. As Christopher Hitchens has
aptly phrased it, here is "fascism with an Islamic face."

ONE OF THE FIRST religious figures in America to grasp the threat of
German fascism was Stephen Wise, president of the World Jewish Congress. As
early as 1933, when Hitler came to power, Wise was warning that Nazism
challenged "the conscience of humanity" with its treatment of
Jews and other non-Aryans. He insisted that Hitler be judged not only by
his military aggression, but by the viciousness of his anti-Semitism--a
campaign to shatter the foundations of every democratic society.
"Peoples and churches permitted themselves to be lulled into
unawareness, because it was only or chiefly the Jew who at the outset was
hurt," Wise observed in 1938. "Men heeded not that the Jews were
assailed as symbol of that civilization, the values of which Nazism was
resolved to destroy."

Mumford similarly faulted America's political and religious leaders for
excusing "the true stigmata of fascism," its love of sadistic
violence. The roots of this pathology had little to do with political or
economic grievances, as many assumed at the time. Rather, the Nazi obsession
with violence and war was self-generated--and insatiable. It produced a
regime in which blackmail, repression, and terror were not accidental
injustices, but part of the very structure of the state.

"We had glibly assumed," Mumford wrote, "that barbarism
was a condition that civilized man had left permanently behind him."
The Nazis refuted all those assumptions, and no appeals to reason or
diplomacy would deter them. Indeed, although a secular thinker, Mumford
came to believe in "radical evil"--that savagery is the easy way
for mankind, the natural drift of things apart from some restraining force
or grace. That insight is worth bearing in mind in light of the 9/11
Commission report. Its authors complain of a "failure of
imagination" in the face of terrorist threats, but it's still not
clear that Washington's policy elites appreciate the religious nihilism
that sustains radical Islam.

In his recent book The Third Reich, historian Michael Burleigh
argues that Hitler's Germany clung to a Teutonic myth of heroic doom, a
high-stakes war for national and racial restoration--or perdition. The
ideology of Nazism, he writes, "offered redemption from a national
ontological crisis, to which it was attracted like a predatory shark to
blood."

Today, it seems, the predators have returned. The crisis this time is
not national and race-based, but supranational and faith-based. The stakes
are equally high, the methods as thoroughly wicked: videotaped beheadings,
the mutilation and public parade of corpses, the murder of women and
children, the recruitment of boys for suicide missions. "We must keep
in mind the nature of the enemy," President Bush told graduates at the
U.S. Air Force Academy in June. "No act of America explains terrorist
violence, and no concession of America could appease it."

Some reject that argument--such as the governments of Spain and the
Philippines, which have bowed to terrorist demands to pull their troops out
of Iraq. Yet the early warnings about Nazism seem eerily relevant today.
"What will finally emerge, if fascism continues to prevail in Europe,
will be a system of barbarism: its stunted, emasculated minds: its
grandiose emptiness: its formalized savagery," Mumford wrote.
"The relapse into barbarism is a recurrent temptation. Only men
can resist it."